Spence Townsend: Break a Leg Essay

Introduction

It goes without saying that some of the historical happens are currently expressed via the use of arts. One of the basic units of arts is visual analysis, which addresses an artwork's formal elements. Undeniably, different sources including the scholarly books, magazines as well as the undergraduate research papers have relied on the details of visual analyses. Nowadays, some students often find visual analysis as part of their assignment while others encounter it in their research papers. Visual analysis plays a central role in the recognition as well as in the comprehension of the visual choices made by the artist in the creation of the artwork. This is to mean that it is via the act of writing and observation of the separate parts of an art object then one clearly understands the art object as a whole. Notably, visual elements such as size, color, line, and the texture are included in the interpretations of the art (Albers, Vivian, & Jerome 197).

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Spence Townsend has been an art person, and he has always held to it that art is a universal language. A language not verbally spoken but one that fosters great thinking of every individual. Spence has been using arts to reach across borders and has been connecting the world. In his various exhibits, he stirs the imagination, leading to even the greatest minds to pause, think and reflect his artwork. All in all his art is in a different level, a level that allows most of the individual's minds to escape into child wonder.

I chose to discuss this piece of art because it is very relatable to my life through the action being displayed. The colors that the artist displayed were one of the many aspects of this portrait that caught my eye and the picture itself was diverse. The portrait has an array of different qualities both visual elements and design principles included. Which is what I will discuss in this article.

Visual Elements

The Visual Elements that I saw in this portrait happened to be line, shape, space, motion, and color. The portrait expressed multiple types of lines throughout the entire painting, such as Line created by an edge and hard and soft lines. I found the presence of lines created by edges in the blue background, the cheerleaders' skirts, the legs of the cheerleaders and the clovers in the background. I also found hard, and soft lines present in the eyebrows of the girls and around the edges of the shoes, they are wearing. The shape was shown through the presence of negative and positive shapes in the artwork. The negative shapes being the clovers on the wall and the blue background /mat and positive shapes that are the cheerleaders.

Space is also a component that was utilized in the painting. In the space the author was given, he was able to utilize vertical placement by placing some cheerleaders higher on the canvas than others. The picture displayed motion through the movement that the audience could interpret since the painting was of cheerleaders dancing. Lastly, color was a major factor in this piece. The artist utilized color through the three hues of color: primary, secondary and intermediate. The primary colors displayed are red, blue and yellow. The secondary colors displayed in the painting are violet, green and orange.

Design Elements

On the other hand, the Design Elements that I noticed happen to be very plain. This painting included design elements such as unity, variety, balance, contrast, scale, and pattern. Unity was an obvious trait of this painting because all of the girls in the painting are dressed in a uniformed fashion. While the uniform may be the immediate view of unity, the cheerleaders also show unity in some of their poses, notice how 3 of the cheerleaders are doing the same pose, creating a less immediate view of unity within the painting. While unity is very apparent, variety is also present. The portrait displays variety because some cheerleaders are in different positions/poses, which creates a form of balance between unity and variety in the portrait.

Other forms of balance present occur within the colors. The bright yellow of the cheerleaders' skirts balances the dark blue in the background behind the skirts of the cheerleaders. The white tops of the cheerleaders are balancing the bright green behind them. The warm orange of the cheerleaders' belt and that of the border of the clover is advancing and seems to be one of the first colors that greet the viewer's eye. A less noticeable balance present in the formation of the cheerleaders; there are three cheerleaders to the left of the cheerleader in the middle and three to the right. Another design element that I believe is present in the painting is contrast. Contrast seems to be present the most near the middle of the painting; the cheerleader in a kneeling position holds a black clover in her hand against her white cheer top. The artist uses the scale in an amazing way when he makes some cheerleaders larger than others, giving the picture a sense of reality. Lastly, a pattern which is present but not dominant. The patterns I found to be present in this painting were the uniforms and clovers on the back wall.

Work Cited

Albers, Peggy, Vivian Vasquez, and Jerome C. Harste. "Making visual analysis critical." Handbook of research on teaching the English language arts (2011): 195-201.